User blog:Rpakr/Reforms
As Username5243 pointed out here, many people think that this wiki needs reforms. However, many people are neither sure on what we have to do nor on whether we should really do it. So, in this blog post I will list three reforms that I think this wiki needs. Too many articles Problem We have more than 10,000 articles, and I feel like this is way too many. Most of the pages are about unimportant Saibianisms like Tethriterator-nonupletetrate or Teterto-terinntothol. These articles have nothing other than the name, the definition and a source. Many of Saibianism articles doesn't even have approximations, making the articles useless. It will be much more useful to learners of googology if series of numbers were actually categorized into groups. It also makes important articles (like articles on notations) harder to find. This applies to not only Saibianisms but other series of numbers such as SAN numbers by Hyp cos, FGH numbers by Denis, UNAN numbers by Username, Nested Cascading-E numbers by Aarex, HAN numbers by Lawrence Hollom, SI prefixes, illion numbers, Hyper-Moser Notation numbers by Aarex, etc. Suggested reform One thing that people have been doing about this is the regiment project, in which articles about a "regiment" of numbers, which ranges anywhere from 10 to 1000 numbers, with a big approximations table, and I personally think this is a great idea. However, making regiment articles is a hard work that often takes hours to complete, so it is expected that if only one person is working on it the person will get bored and stop, which is what happened to me. So, we need more people to work on the regiment project. However, just doing the regiment project is not enough as it does not decrease the number of articles. So, after the regiment project is done, we should start deleting articles on unimportant numbers. Articles on important numbers like godgahlah or tethrathoth should be kept. It's fine even if doing this makes the number of articles drop to 1000, because the number of articles is not what's important. Also, currently there are many articles on numbers that are not related to googology such as 125000. These articles should be deleted too. Better notability standards Problem Currently there are no good notability standards in the wiki. This is causing major problems such as thousands of articles on unimportant numbers being made and articles on important notations such as Letter notation by PsiCubed2, R function by Hyp cos, and Dollar function by Wythagoras. This happens because the current notability standard is for the number/notation to have an outside source, which is not good since there are many good notations on this wiki and many unimportant numbers with outside sources. Suggested reform The "outside source rule" was created mainly in order to prevent articles about made-up numbers being made, but it is also preventing articles on notations that are only in the the wiki from being made. So, I think we should abolish the "outside source rule" and replace it with discussion rule. The discussion rule works as follows: admins first put the "Candidate for deletion" template on an article the admin thought should be deleted. (Note that this doesn't apply to vandalism articles, so they can be deleted immediately.) If no one opposed the deletion the article will be deleted after a certain period of time. If someone oppsed the deletion, people would discuss (probably on the "candidate for deletion" category talk page) about it, and admins will delete the article depending on the result of the discussion. One consequence of this is that admins will be more powerful than before now that the notability standard is not as clear as before, but this problem is easily solved since bureaucrats can just demote admins that abused their rights multiple times. Not enough admins Problem We don't have enough admins. (See here for the list of admins in this wiki.) The only two active admins are Cloudy176 and Ikosarakt1, but Ikosarakt1 rarely comes here so Cloudy176 is basically the only active admin. This is too few for a wiki of this size. (For example, the Japanese Googology Wiki has 10 admins that edited the wiki in the last 30 days.) We need more admins to manage the wiki properly. Suggested reform We should make more people like Hyp cos and Username5243 admins. Category:Blog posts